Photonics-enabled Radio-Frequency Arbitrary Waveform Generation

There is increasing need for arbitrary RF waveforms with very wide instantaneous bandwidths for defense and commercial applications. Standard electronic approaches have limited bandwidth and are sensitive to electromagnetic interference. Photonic approaches are believed to be the solution because light is wideband and non-dispersive in RF. Fourier transform pulse shaping (FPS) and Direct Space-to-time pulse shaping (DST) are two main techniques to generate RF arbitrary waveforms. However, FPS requires massive numerical computations in order to find the Fourier components of the wanted RF waveform. DST is simple in controlling the waveforms but it cannot produce very large time-bandwidth product waveforms. SA Photonics is pleased to propose a program to develop a high performance Photonic programmable Arbitrary RF Waveform generation System (PAWS). The PAWS is a compact and robust fiber optics system capable of producing bipolar, large time-bandwidth product and repetitive RF pulses with programmable pulse envelopes. It combines the advantages of FPS and DST but does not have their pitfalls. It contains a DST pulse shaper, waveform time stretcher, waveform bandwidth extender and bipolar waveform generation.